Laura Pels Theatre

When Merrily We Roll Along opened in 1981, Frank Rich wrote, “to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals.” However, this time around, it was not simpy the songs that led to the heartbreak. “Mr. Sondheim has given this evening a half-dozen songs that are crushing and beautiful—that soar […]

“I began with a desire to speak with the dead,” Stephen Greenblatt writes at the beginning of Shakespearean Negotiations. “Literature professors are salaried, middle-class shamans.” For a few years in the ‘nineties, Tom Stoppard also desired to speak with the dead. His plays Arcadia and Indian Ink (the latter is currently being revived by Roundabout) both concern people in […]

Just because Dinner with Friends is much like every other domestic play written in the past eighty years—John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger comes especially to mind—doesn’t mean it is a bad one. In fact, it is excellent. Donald Margulies’ script is witty, unassuming, and quietly perceptive. It opens at the end of a dinner party hosted by […]

Being a Jew is exhausting. There’s the self-loathing, the guilt, the language (which doesn’t even use Roman letters), and—for those of us born after 1948—the inescapable identification of Jewishness with Auschwitz. Even the question of what it means to consider oneself a Jew is too complex for any reasonable person to try to answer completely. […]

It’s a common choice. A young actor, known mostly for teen angst movies or shallow blockbusters, decides to take a stab at legitimacy. It can go either way. Recently, Disney Channel alumnus Shia LaBeouf humiliated himself in a series of interviews filled with choice nonsensical quotes like, “You give Terrence Malick a movie like Transformers, […]

Simon Gray’s The Common Pursuit follows the lives and times of five literary men in England. Each scene jumps ahead about five or six years, beginning in the group’s undergraduate years in Cambridge and concluding about twenty years later. The scenes are snapshots and in only a few hours, we are given the same sense […]